Interview before the Bodø concert: «Dere kan vente en veldig loud Scotsman»

Preliminary interview ahead of the first Bodø concert (Den Siste Glæde, Sunday 13.04.1997) on the music page, alongside a short review of Fairytales for Hard Men (“folksanger i stor-format”: raw, hard and yet warm and humorous; you need strong nerves to take the whole album in one go).

Leven announces that the audience can expect a very “loud” Scotsman with a loud guitar and sad rock songs, plus funny stories. The biggest problem when playing solo, he says, is the audience's beer consumption; but his guitar makes enough noise, and he even plays drum solos on it. Doll by Doll played on three tracks of the new album; in the autumn they intended to reissue the old albums and do a small Norwegian tour. Norway, he says, is the country he values most after Scotland. He has already been to Tromsø and thanks the bar in the Grand Hotel on the sleeve; during a stopover in Bodø the previous year he had decided to ask his Norwegian tour manager for a gig there.

He has only good things to say about Mike Scott, with whom he worked on his first solo album. He got to know Rolf Jacobsen through Robert Bly, who translated “Solsikke” for him; with Bly he occasionally holds poetry evenings at which a lot of Jacobsen is read. He hears for the first time of Henning Gravrok from Bodø, who has made a whole album of Jacobsen texts, and would like to meet him. At the end he asks about Bodø; asked about salmon, he says wild salmon is good anywhere, but he rejects farmed salmon – and reacts drastically when he hears that Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) runs a salmon farm.